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Misplaced Resentment

Misplaced Resentment

The
left has been using class warfare as a campaign tactic for sometime now.Why?Because it works.It’s easy to get people to resent others who are more fortunate than
they are, and parlay that resentment into votes.Since they won the last two presidential elections, we must
conclude that they are good at choosing campaign tactics that work.Too bad they’re not so good at choosing
policies that work once they win.

Resenting
someone, simply because they have more money than you, is not a good
quality.Envy is one of the seven
deadly sins, and the tenth commandment says that we shall not covet anything
that is our neighbor’s.For those
of you that automatically reject anything connected to with religion, check out
my earlier “Barbecue Grill” post.

It’s
hard to not resent the super rich; it almost comes naturally, especially if
things are not going that well for you.Even if you know that you should cast that resentment away, it seems
like it can creep up on you whenever you let your guard down.Maybe we will always have some form of
resentment in us that we can never entirely eliminate.Maybe the best we can hope to do is to
manage and control it.Maybe our
problem isn’t resentment itself; maybe it’s misplaced or misdirected
resentment.

Envy
is always a bad thing, but resentment is not.We should resent things that are illegal or immoral, but
being rich, in and of itself, is neither of these.What reason is there, other than envy, to resent the
rich?Can you come up with any
instance where a rich person has directly caused you harm?Maybe, whenever we have any feelings of
resentment creep up on us, we should ask ourselves that type of question, which
will let us know if the resentment is justified.

OK,
so we all know that we cannot justify resenting someone simply for being rich,
what about them not paying their fair share of taxes?The “rich” already pay the most in federal personal income
taxes by far, and even if you don’t believe me or, if you believe me and still
don’t think they pay enough, the rich don’t set their own tax rates, the
government does.If you’re going
to resent anyone here, look to the folks in Washington D.C.

How
about all those celebrities and athletes?They aren’t even employers.Why do they deserve more money than someone who provides jobs and
struggles with the challenges of running a business?The way our economic system rewards individuals with success
is based upon supply and demand.As soon as you introduce subjective notions such as, “who deserves what”
into the mix, you start slipping toward having a different type of economic
system that doesn’t work as well.We shouldn’t resent celebrities for the money they make, but when they
use their positions to push political agendas and comment on things in which
they have no expertise, they’re fair game.

The
people who we should resent are the ones that cause us harm.This includes:

1)Criminals – No explanation needed.

2)Certain politicians – The ones who want to limit
our freedoms and take even more of our hard-earned money.

3)Certain government employees – The ones who
receive far better salary and benefit packages than most people in the private
sector could ever hope to have, and throw a fit when a debt-laden government
asks them for even the smallest concession.

4)Able bodied people living off the system – It’s
not only unfair that they’re doing nothing while we all work to support them,
they are essentially stealing resources from people who are truly in need.

5)The mainstream media – They’re too short sighted
to see that their left-biased reporting will in the end, will hurt themselves
most of all.